Progress: Skills & Items

Hey! Quick update on the progress being made. I would have liked to do a post sooner, but honestly, this part of development really is just a significant amount of quantity being made to populate systems I've already described. You can always have more skills and more items.

Skill Progress: Everything has been going smoothly, creating more mechanical options for players and fleshing out how character creation will work. A lot of passive abilities created ended up being more reasonable to utilize as random modifiers on items (more on them below). I ran into a pretty strange bug within MapTools that I spent a full day trying to even figure out what was happening. Exhausted by that, I have been taking the last week to just do other things and avoid making progress on system mechanics. As usually, I can sit down and sprint for days getting a ton of work done, but I mentally hit a roadblock and need to mix things up so I can come back and start that cycle again. That bug has since been resolved and the path forward is more clear. Just keep doing more of the same.

Items: The 'magic find' rarity that determines quality of items has drastically changed. There is no more roll to see if items are 'magical' and get additional properties. It became clear that was necessary because the amount of modifiers on an item that I was attributing to 'Rarity' and not 'Magic' was already a high amount. Stacking 3 more powerful modifiers on these items has just became unreasonable, so the philosophy on what a 'magical' item in has been changed. Trinkets and things like Rings/Amulets will contain statistical modifiers closer to what I'd expect from magic items.

But, to explain what makes those different, lets quickly go over what a normal item is like. Different types of armor are basically done fully complete. I can always add more modifiers to their individual tables, but there is already a ton of  variety. There is Light, Medium, and Heavy attire with room for a 4th option to be added later. Each base type of armor has about 6 pre-determined base types that describe the defense of the item. Heavy Attire has high defense and armor. Light Attire has an option that starts a player in combat with stacks of 'Impervious', fully negating sources of damage equal to how much Impervious they have. The value for both of those is determined by the rarity of the 1-100 roll. 

After that, the item is assigned to have 0-4 modifiers. If an item has 0 modifiers, the value of the base defensive stats are greatly increased (3.5x base value). This multiplier is reduced by each modifier the item rolls so that having more variety on an item doesn't explicitly make it better. Extremely low quality items, 15 rarity and below, get 0 modifiers, but do not get any multiplied mod value to set a baseline for the ultimate tier of trash gear.  There are currently about 30 modifiers for each tier of attire that are all variably scaled in this way. Some of these options themselves also have many different options within them.

For example, a modifier can be resistance to a particular type of status effect, causing it to be added to you at a value -5 what it would be. As shown in the previous post skill video, this is done by adding 'mod.Burn':5 skill to a player. What the modifiers themselves are doing with this uniformly named skill system is making the Burn in that situation a variable that checks all Ailments that currently exist within the system. All status effects have uniformly been assigned 'Ailment', 'Condition', 'Mental', or 'Buff' tags to help narrow down these lists to what is needed. Resistance is not the most exciting example, but this similar for a lot of effects.

What is going to make the magical trinkets different purely comes from what I've learned through making a full set of attire modifiers. Simply put, some powerful options I'd like to see on items simply could not scale with rarity and the amount of mods on the item without quickly becoming very powerful. If a modifier is 'Gain +1 Adrenaline every turn', scaling that to +2 Adrenaline  is a profound power increase. Not at all how having -1 or -2 Burn resistance would be -- Particularly when things are also being scaled by the # of mods that appear on an item. More mods just give more chances at one of these powerful options, that should be a lower value, but can't really scale below 1.

This really just makes magical trinkets a solution to that problem. Any effect that I would like to add to an item that is seen as always powerful, no matter how much you scale it up or down, will appear here. As a result of them always being powerful, as mentioned earlier they also need a certain amount of item rarity to appear at all. Similarly, I want a table of unique items that allow some of these more profound options to appear on items that otherwise wouldn't have them, like the attire.

Much like the progress on making skills, items are just a grind to completion without much room for interesting updates beyond explaining the core concepts. 

The only significant thing that has changed so far while making many skills has been the realization that requiring a specific birth sign to select some options is likely a bad idea. It makes a lot more sense to require that a skill choice be one of the broader quadrants of the birth sign chart like 'Body' or 'Spirt' and then add benefits for having the more specific sign rather than restricting everyone else from picking it at all. For example, any of the blood themed abilities that were made for Maelstrom should not require Maelstrom. They should require Body, but also offer a unique benefit for having the Maelstrom sign -- and perhaps other signs as well. I think its better for character creation options and honestly, better for me. The more things are divided up, the more work I'll have to do creating a whole list of compelling choices within tiny areas irrelevant to most characters. In this scenario, you also only need 1 birth sign within the Body section of the chart to qualify for any 'Body' skill. This way you can take 2 Birth Signs and potentially gain access to 2 'spell lists' much more consistently.

Suddenly taking all the abilities I've made and placing them within these more broader pools of options means I'm actually pretty far along. The biggest delay on setting a date for the next session 0 for a campaign remains having all the character options ready for the players -- And items are just as important to character creation. After that I need to revisit what I was doing for more social oriented abilities and things should be good to go. Granted, those things may still be 2-3 months away from seeing completion.